Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday December 17, 2009 @03:56AM
from the no-more-chances dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand government has reintroduced a newly rewritten addition to the Copyright Act which will allow rights' holders to send copyright notices to ISPs, and force them to pass them on to account holders. Section 92A of the Copyright Act will allow rights holders to take people who have been identified as infringers more than three times in front of a Copyright Tribunal. This law will allow the Copyright Tribunal to hand down either a $15,000 fine or six months internet disconnection. The law specifies that the account holder himself is responsible for what is downloaded via the account, and doesn't make allowances for identifying the actual copyright infringer if there are multiple computers tied to an account."

Honestly, I think this is one of their moments. Considering the Draconian punishments in most other civilized countries for copyright infringement, this is very reasonable. 3 warnings, then you go to jail and at most have to pay 15,000... which is about 1/100th of what US courts are handing out?

Honestly, I think this is one of their moments. Considering the Draconian punishments in most other civilized countries for copyright infringement, this is very reasonable. 3 warnings, then you go to jail and at most have to pay 15,000... which is about 1/100th of what US courts are handing out?

I read the article and all it specifies is for "copying material". Does that mean uploading, or also downloading, or what? What if it is for downloading?

We have become so accustomed to think copyrighted material = songs or movies. How many times do we stop to think that web page we're looking at, with 20 different.gifs or.jpegs might be a violation? Are those lolcat pictures properly licensed? If I email a few, will I be in violation of the distribution part?

And what about text?

This is what is so insane of copyright, and specifically of criminalizing it. Because it makes 99.999% of the populace guilty, and then it's purely up to the state to use it on a person when they feel like it. 3 strikes and you're out of you mind if you think this is a fair deal. Fuck you, I'd rather live in a free and open society, not one where the next step is to consider libraries copyright thieves for providing a copymachine near the books.

Honestly, this legislation is but a foot in the door. MPAA and RIAA rather not waste their own resources with civil trials, they'd rather waste the taxpayer's resources to prosecute people and put the fear in them, the populace's own money used against them. What a load.

I'd rather live in a free and open society, not one where the next step is to consider libraries copyright thieves for providing a copymachine near the books.

Libraries feel the same way, and they're way ahead of you.:) www.accesscopyright.ca

The concern becomes what movement pushes bulk copyright licensing into unmanageable territory. Many content owners don't care for it, the same way they don't care for libraries. (Despite the fact they are extremely likely to have made use of libraries in their formative years, that enabled them to become professional content owners. Capitalism has no taste for irony.)

This is what is so *convenient* of copyright, and specifically of criminalizing it. Because it makes 99.999% of the populace guilty, and then it's purely up to the state to use it on a person when they feel like it.

I wonder how the "three strikes" meme has become so popular all over the world. It's as if some PR people thought:--We really, really want to punish copyright infringers. And we don't want all that hassle with due process. Now how can we avoid that... is there some area of human endeavour where punishment without process is regarded as tough and fair? I got it! Sports! Everyone knows the umpire's boss! Let's push a "three strikes and you're out" law!

Reminds me of George Carlin's 10 commandments [youtube.com]. Basically a bunch of copyright holders and political hustlers got together. They knew people were stupid and would do basically what their told so they convinced people they needed to be punished. Plus three sounds "official".

Know your enemy. "THEY" are the International Intelectual Property Alliance (IIPA) [iipa.com], and they have the full political clout [ustr.gov] of the US government behind them - working to subvert democratic process in just about every country in the world [iipa.com] via three strikes/no presumption of innocence for the sheeple. As one small example of many, check out their recent "report" on Spain [iipa.com]. Witness the resulting [expatica.com] political clout [latimes.com] and of course, the result they were after with local laws against P2P [slashdot.org]. Spain is the 8th largest economy in the world - not so easy to boss around if unwilling to cooperate. UK, France appear to be more than happy to bend over for IIPA without any fight - at least Spain managed to keep judicial process in the loop, for now at least. All of it does not bode well for tiny countries like NZ that do not stand much chance against combined international coercion from the "IIPA Club".

P.S Here is the motivation behind this law, it was a done deal at least by March 4, 2009. From the Lions mouth (under New Zealand) [iipa.com]: "IIPA testifies in support of the initiation of negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (TPP FTA) with Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, Peru and Vietnam."
PDF Link [iipa.com].
So there you go. This is at least part of the entry fee NZ used for this trade agreement. What coercion did IIPA use on Singapore, Chile, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, Peru and Vietnam? Check for yourself if you dare... but don't expect anything pretty.

"IIPA testifies in support of the initiation of negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (TPP FTA) with Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, Peru and Vietnam."
PDF Link [iipa.com].

From IIPA's blessing for NZ on the trade agreement: "Specific problems in some of the TPP countries are outlined in the Special 301 reports from 2009 for Chile [iipa.com], Peru [iipa.com], Brunei [iipa.com], and Vietnam [iipa.com]".

You are right, resistance is futile. The issue is that we, the people, are in reaction mode, only noticing the vermins when they actually start nibbling our toes. I think the only productive action would be to outlaw the existence of these organizations and restructure copyright law.

Anything less than that is not going to make a significant difference. Yes, maybe we can delay the trend for a few years, while the corporations milking the general population are getting richer, stronger and fiercer and the peo

You know, that's a VERY strong point. I've been planning the same thing. We currently manage several server farms in Europe, so it would be ideal to live in N-Z and manage them remotely - work hours there are nighttime here, so server management doesn't bug users - but I'm not going to move down there if there's a chance some employee fucknut decides to download a few seasons of House and snowballs our internet connection. This is NOT a good idea for their economy.

I had a shell account in 1994. I lived out in the provinces, not in the main cities. It may have been possible to get on the internet in Akl, Chch and Wgtn in 1990(dial-up of course, ADSL was available only since the late 90's (with low traffic caps.)

Anyway I don't know why the law is '3 strikes' since they don't (widely) play baseball in NZ - Cricket is the summer sport.

Just curious, because in the US we have similar laws. If I move I must change the address on my license within only a month I think -- needless to say I still have my parents address on my license but have not lived there for over 5 years. I haven't changed it mostly because its a pain in the ass to change and super easy to just re-register using the same information.

And if the police or DMV ever have to mail you something, they will mail it to the address on file. That you don't live there anymore and d

How hard can it be to stop doing it after you've been hauled before two tribunals?

So tell us, have you stopped beating your wife yet?

In case you can't tell, I'm pointing out the ridiculousness of telling someone to stop doing something when they were never doing it in the first place, and then punishing them after you tell them a third time when, again, they never did the deed for which you are punishing them.

On the face of it, this at least looks better than the UK law. Over here they want to make it three accusations and you're out. At least the New Zealand law is back up by due process and has to be done by a tribunal.

On the down side, I guess it is tied to the account owner rather than the person who did it, which could lead to parents taking the punishment because of their kids.

Yeah, from what I understand, I kind of like it. Here in the US, if they catch you once, they will try to pull you into court (or settle for $). In New Zealand, they have to give you two warnings before they take you in. Plenty of time to change to a more discreet ISP.

Hi folks, I'm a New Zealander who's been following this law as part of an organisation called the Creative Freedom Foundation (I don't know what I can do to prove my credentials to an international audience... er, lowish/. id#?)
Anyway here's the gist of the new proposal,

People are innocent until proven guilty either by the Copyright Tribunal or the courts.

Termination can only be ordered by the courts, not the Copyright Tribunal

No special sanctions on right holders for false or malicious allegations.

Penalties of up to $15,000 may be awarded by the Copyright Tribunal. This is in keeping with the maximum of the Disputes Tribunal.

The courts have existing maximum fines that are already established under the Copyright Act.

New definition for ISP that is narrower and excludes organisations such as businesses and universities. Too early to tell what this means for shared connections such as internet cafes, open WiFi, etc.

It says "right holders will pay a fee per notice" although as regulations not set might be premature to read too much into that. This is as opposed to a process that allowed many notices on a flat-rate for rights-holders.

No resolution to the overlap with s92C disputes. As outlined in our submission s92C lacks a counternotice procedure and due process. Further due to technology changes there may be no functional difference between an s92C or s92A dispute.

Privacy is maintained by anonymizing details until a verdict is reached by the tribunal.

It's not a conventional "3 strike" process which is based on Guilt Upon Accusation, this is a tribunal system (as you asked, an extension of the existing Copyright Tribunal) to deal with copyright infringement online.
If you have any questions about this let me know. Cheers.

It's a new division of the existing Copyright Tribunal which is a government-run body, but it will need new staff. The existing head of the Copyright Tribunal is Susy Frankel, who you can learn more about here [creativefreedom.org.nz].

How is it different than a regular court?

The Copyright Tribunal, like the Disputes Tribunal, is a lighter-weight process than a court but it has considerably fewer sanctions available (tribuna

Also is it about uploading or downloading?Because when it comes down to it how do I know the sites I'm on are authorised to distribute the content they do?I can't.No more than I can tell if a radio station I've tuned in to has been paying it's licence fees.

If I'm distributing, fine, it's my job to check if I have the right to distribute but I have problems seeing how they could sensibly go after downloaders.

It's about copyright infringement on an internet connection, so to answer your question: both.
The process is based on taking someone to tribunal for what their internet connection was used for. It's a basic court-like system, where if you're accused of infringement you defend yourself with whatever evidence you have that what you did was acceptable or that. In that respect it's like most trial systems that have a presumption of innocence but an obligation to defen

And that would *never* do... fancy having to be *responsible* for your own children !!! What is the world coming to ???

Not all children do what their parents tell them to do all the time (or ever).

"Make the parents responsible" is standard populist rubbish. Sounds good on talkback radio, but it only takes a few seconds of actual thought to see how ridiculously unfair and unworkable it would be in the real world.

That's about the time I remember that common sense left at least my country of origin.

Capital Punishment was abolished in school.Teachers scared of the kids.Parents getting sued by their own kids, on false accusations of abuse.Parents scared of the kids.Police attacking soft targets instead of real criminals.No one scared of the police, especially the kids.Social workers becoming like jackbooted police, seeing abuse everywhere, when basically some kids are just bad little bastards, and need a cuff round the

Does this exist yet? We need a truly anonymous network for P2P transactions, even if it is slower, being free would be nice too.(although sadly, I can imagine our pals the kiddie porn crew making use of it and having whatever it is, outlawed)

This is merely a presentation/technical problem. One can design a system whereby even though data is travelling through and being stored by nodes, at no point in time that data by itself can be used to reconstruct "child porn", "intellectual property", "bomb plans" (or in fact anything meaningful at all). One has to specifically instruct one's node to obtain the complete set from other nodes to be able to even tell what the contents is (outside of completely independent process of labelling, search and inde

Well, the point of such a thing would be that it is not possible to ban/detect without also banning any and all VPN, HTTPS, TLS and other "legit" Internet traffic. A properly designed successor to BitTorrent, Gnutella, Usenet, Freenet and Tor would by definition require banning of the whole Internet to stop it.

Not that the villains known as politicians and "lawmakers" won't eventually try that too, this whole actual (as opposed to being-paid-pompous-lip-service-to-but-in-practice-next-to-impossible) "freedom of information" basic-element-of-democracy thing has been a thorn in their sides from the get go. They and similarly interested big-media and big "entertainment" mega-corps would like their control of the narrative back, thank you very much, even if it somehow involves our dead bodies as one of the steps to get there. And the sooner we get to the ammo-boxes stage of the "boxes-of-change" sequence the more likely things will be decided one way or the other for better or worse, this of course amongst many other pending outrages and societal devolutions that have been galloping ahead of late heading in the same general direction of utter tyrannical dystopia or general bloodshed.

Freenet, I2P and gnunet can probably be counted as secure enough, as well as most darknet variants like oneswarm. The rash of communications privacy violations has pretty much ensured that's where we're heading; widespread untraceable heavily encrypted utterly opaque communications.

It's about freedom of choice and convenience, not about free as in $0.

Heck, they won't even quit bugging me on DVDs I bought legally -- notice those stern copyright warnings that you can't skip? Come on, I did what you gives wanted and you *still* have to treat me like a potential criminal??

I'm damn sure that if I found some ripping off my work(*), that I wouldn't want to be reduced to sending them three "Pretty please stop" letters before finally being given the chance to inconvenience them temporarily.

Clearly the NZ government is heavily biased in favour of the leechers and pirates, and hates rights owners with a passion.

(*) Work is something that you produce in return for renumeration, once you move out of your parents' basement.

It sounds like you're missing a bit of perspective. Everyone in the world has seen Hello magazine or something along those lines and comes to the conclusion that the people these laws are meant to protect are already obscenely overprivelidged. Until celebrity status gets a good kick in the teeth and gets put in its place, no one is going to have an ounce of sympathy. It's got nothing to do with evil pirates against poor innocent rights holders. It's just that everyone outside of the deep underground forced

"(*) Work is something that you produce in return for renumeration, once you move out of your parents' basement."...and therein lies your FAIL. You do not even know what work is, which does not come as a suprise.

Work is actually something you do, not something you produce. Something may be produced as a result of work, but it is not itself, work.

You see, this is the problem with people like yourself, you believe it's acceptable to do a small amount of work to produce something, and then profit off that sma

Actually the $15,000NZ and the six month disconnection are just the maximums the Copyright Tribunal can hand down. The summary makes it seem like they are the default judgements: they aren't. Rights holders will need to prove that they were damaged severly to get awarded this. Really, the maximum penalty of $15,000NZ for effectively three infringements is tiny compared to judgements in the US against people like Jammie Thomas.

As much as I despise three strikes laws like this, at least this legislation has judicial oversight and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. As I understand, there will be a fee associated fo lodging and infringement notice, so it won't be a free for all for the MPAA or RIAA (or their NZ counterparts). However, penalties for false notices haven't been addressed yet, although organisations like the Creative Freedom Foundation [creativefreedom.org.nz] are pushing to have this addressed before it becomes law.

Ensuring that it's mainly useful for large corporations rather than any smaller artists.

Which is exactly why groups like the Creative Freedom Foundation are pushing for penalties for false or frivolous use of the notice system and fighting for improved rights for small artists over large corporations. But you are right in that copyright has always favoured the large corporations.

With fundamentally unethical laws like this judicial oversight doesn't make up for it...

What exactly makes this 'fundamentally unethical'? I never said I liked the law, but surely this is far more ethical than the previous version that had guilt upn accusation and no judicial oversight.

It's become obvious that the disastrous abomination of a legal experiment called 'copyright' needs to be completely abolished to protect a free and open society.

Ensuring that it's mainly useful for large corporations rather than any smaller artists.

Even the maximum fine is going to be quite trivial for a major corporation and can you really see a broadcaster, record or movie company being taken off the Internet for 6 hours, let alone 6 months, how ever much copyright infringement they get up to?

Ensuring that it's mainly useful for large corporations rather than any smaller artists.

The intention was to make it small enough to allow any artist to lodge a complaint, while making it large enough that there won't be the illegal DMCA spam there is in the US (I say illegal because they have to swear to lodge it in the US, and we know that they don't even check the content and still swear they are the proper owner of the IP based on a filename).

Now I'm not sure if it's a fine (which I'd expect is payable to the court or the government), or a penalty (payable to the rights holder whose rights have been infringed). TFS and TFA use both terms.

Anyway keeping those penalties at relative low level (though NZ$15,000 is a lot of money for most people) there is a good chance that the cost of the rights holders per case is similar to the settlement they could get. Especially if a hearing is requested and lawyers are needed. That should be a great deterrent

Since they don't care about _who_ actually downloaded the content only who owns the account and pays the bill for the ISP, could you not use this law against innocent people or as a weapon of choice against your enemies by tapping their wireless networks to download your torrents and media?

I propose that everyone in NZ goes out and cracks every wireless network they can and do just that, show them the backwards thinking of not caring about going after the actual infringing party but the account owner.

..you know what? I'm one of those honest dufuses that actually purchase music, dvds, blu-rays and games legally, and have done so most of my life. Other than that - I use Open Source a lot, and basically all the alternatives to the commercial software.

But hearing about 3 strikes, and the HATRED and witch hunt on ordinary people all the time, makes me think - am I the only one thinking...soon I'm not going to give a f*ck and just pirate the hell out of them just because I can?

Assume you write up a generic example of a "letter to a member of parliament". You know, with the usual fluff people include in them. Then publish it on the internet with all rights reserved. Then a friend of yours, who has no rights to redistribute the work, emails it to members of parliament. They open their email client in the morning and bam, they have just downloaded illegally distributed copyright-infringing material. Which is why a law like this cannot work, target the distributors not the receivers.

Account holders aren't gate keepers. You cannot hold them responsible for their internet connection's use any more than you hold a car owner responsible instead of the driver. "Sorry gov, you car was nicked and was used to commit a hit and run, your under arrest". Law cannot work like this. I'm sure one of the politicians isn't tech savy enough to have a secure home network, someone please download something copied via their network, then report what's happened with the politicians home network. I hope I'm

On a related note, how does a "three strikes" law really make sense in non baseball cultures? Wouldn't it make more sense to have soccer (football) focused countries have a "two card" law (yellow warning then a red ejection)?

"Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest on to three. Five is right out." - Amen

A soccer equivalent would probably be something like "if the record company detects an infringing download, a representative will fall to the floor screaming, rolling from side to side in agony, clutching his face with his hands, until a charge is laid; at that point the record company representative will stand up and go about his business".